In cases in which there is no standard orthography for a language or language variant, written texts will display a variety of orthographic choices. This is problematic for natural language processing (NLP) because it creates spurious data sparseness. We study the transformation of spontaneously spelled Egyptian Arabic into a conventionalized orthography which we have previously proposed for NL...

Across cultures, people conceptualize time as if it flows along a horizontal timeline, but the direction of this implicit timeline is culture-specific: in cultures with left-to-right orthography (e.g., English-speaking cultures) time appears to flow rightward, but in cultures with right-to-left orthography (e.g., Arabic-speaking cultures) time flows leftward. Can orthography influence implicit ...

In recent years, there has been growing interest in how L2 learners’ perceptual abilities relate to their lexical representation of foreign words, and in how orthography may play a role in this. In this study we address both questions using two perception experiments that were concerned with the discrimination and representation of German long vowels by Polish learners of L2 German and a native...

It is well known that the statistical characteristics of a language, such as word frequency or the consistency of the relationships between orthography and phonology, influence literacy acquisition. Accordingly, linguistic databases play a central role by compiling quantitative and objective estimates about the principal variables that affect reading and writing acquisition. We describe a new s...

Tunisian Arabic is a dialect of the Arabic language spoken in Tunisia. Tunisian Arabic is an under-resourced language. It has neither a standard orthography nor large collections of written text and dictionaries. Actually, there is no strict separation between Modern Standard Arabic, the official language of the government, media and education, and Tunisian Arabic; the two exist on a continuum ...

Languages vary in the grain size used to map orthography onto phonology, but the use of different grain sizes varies also within a language. A core question is what kind of information the reading system is using to map orthography onto phonology. A unit that has received particular attention in recent years is the grapheme. Graphemes are defined as written representations of phonemes, and they...

Interactive models of reading propose that phonological representations directly activate and/or constrain orthographic representations through feedback. These models also predict that spoken words should activate their orthographic forms. The effect of word orthography on auditory lexical access was investigated in two patients with alexia without agraphia. Several theories of alexia suggest t...